Leopoldo Galtieri

Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri, a failed dictator, died on January 12th, aged 76

THE dictatorship of General Leopoldo Galtieri lasted only eight months, one of the shortest in the murky annals of repression. He might have been forgiven by at least some of his fellow Argentines for his ruthlessness, but not for his stupidity. Laurence Peter, a Canadian academic, made a study of stupid people in positions of power. In “The Peter Principle”, published in 1969, he came up with the now much-quoted aphorism, “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”

Incompetence in civilian life, in commerce or in the professions, can have serious consequences. In government it can be disastrous, as it was for Argentina in 1982, when General Galtieri was the unelected military president. Argentina was going through one of its regular periods of high inflation and poor growth. A united opposition was demanding a return to democracy. Day after day crowds gathered outside the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, to jeer at the general. The protests were largely forgotten when he announced that Argentina was to seize the Falklands, a small group of islands in the south Atlantic some 480km (300 miles) off Argentina that had been a British possession since 1833, and had a population of 1,800 loyal Brits and a lot of sheep. The Malvinas, to give them their Spanish name, had long been claimed by Argentina, and the general's decision to “return” them satisfied a deep-rooted desire in most of his countrymen.

Such a patriotic gesture is an old remedy, and has had a degree of success. Hitler reinforced his popularity by sending troops into the Rhineland in 1936 against French wishes. These days Pakistan's self-appointed president, General Musharraf, is routinely bellicose towards India.

On April 2nd 1982 Argentine troops landed and overwhelmed the small British garrison. The crowds outside the Casa Rosada made General Galtieri the happy man of our picture. Perhaps he could become another Juan Domingo Peron, the populist leader and national icon who had emerged from the army in the 1940s? It had all seemed so easy. Why had no one taken possession of the islands before? Possibly because previous rulers had not assumed, as General Galtieri had, that Britain was a mangy lion that would accept defeat.

Southward ho!

Britain, under Margaret Thatcher, buckled on its rusty armour and dispatched every warship, troopship and rowing boat available to the Falklands, 13,000km away. General Galtieri turned for support to the United States president, Ronald Reagan, who had praised him as a “magnificent general” for clamping down on leftists. For a while the Americans did seem to wobble, sending an envoy to Britain and Argentina to press for a “peace deal”. But Mr Reagan was a pal of Mrs Thatcher and gave Britain whatever help it asked for. General Galtieri sent thousands of troops to bolster his initial force, but the army was mostly made up of poorly-trained, poorly-equipped conscripts, used to spreading fear among demonstrating students, but no match for British professionals. On June 14th the Argentines surrendered.

Three days later General Galtieri was awakened from a nap and, clad only in his underwear, told that he was no longer president. Another general took over the presidency, but democracy began to be restored the following October. There were fears at the end of 2001, when Argentina was again in an economic pickle, that the army might put in its boot once more, but the current relative stability has eased such tensions.

General Galtieri's angry former military colleagues wanted him executed by firing squad. Instead, he was sentenced to 12 years in jail for mishandling the Falklands conflict, and served five years. His role in the “dirty war” during the period of military rule from 1976 to 1983, when thousands of dissidents were killed or disappeared, is still being argued over, and at the time of his death he was under house arrest. There seems to be no dispute that high office fazed him. “Only Johnny Walker is crying”, was the headline in a Buenos Aires newspaper in a reference to the general's dependence on Scotch whisky.

When he joined the army as a young man he was interested in military engineering, and probably his ambitions should have stopped there. But he came from a poor family, the descendants of Italian immigrants, and wanted to do better. While a lieutenant he was noticed by American advisers attached to the Argentine army and in 1949 attended the American army's School of the Americas in Panama, where a number of Latin America's future dictators received training in counter-insurgency and anti-communism. He is believed to be the only student in the history of the school to have failed the course. Despite this warning, he continued to be promoted and in 1981 took over as president from General Roberto Viola, who was unwell and, worse, had dangerous notions of a freer society.

“What most puzzles me”, says Oscar Raul Cardoso, an Argentine political analyst, “is how someone so mediocre in all senses reached the top.” Could it happen again? If you believe Laurence Peter's melancholy prediction, the answer is probably yes, again and again.